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TONIGHT April 17, 2007 Tonight, the sun gutters down to its wick as daylight strains and refracts in skirls across the lake’s wide water. Heavy rollers of rain heave against headland and tree line. Lightning falls in its slow white script to farmland and watershed. Still, I know so little of the rain that plays this lake like a snare—time run thin through the sky’s turnstiles, all the grief and shrift I cannot hold but do moving in from the north. What else can I say of these ball-peen hammers of distant thunderheads? What else can I say of this lake most deep where the mud newt sups and the black leech dreams of swimmers and blood? If only I could drop into sediment and murk, so much lost of the heart’s heave through amnion and the liquid wake and sleep, so much forgotten of the ocean’s collapse and the skull cap’s crowning. The boom. The crux. The good steel bolt slid home in the flame. Here, in these first few minutes of dusk, I say Sunset, you take too much—sun having preened its glossy spoke, last light departed into the west. Here, tonight, I say Land, you leave us too soon— sky bottomed out, the lake clicked shut. 7 ...

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